Nearly thirty years after the first French explorers, and shortly after the visit of Champollion, Wilkinson surveyed the ruins, and apparently saw, not only the ramps of approach to the courts, but also one of the pillared corridors whose walls were covered with sculptures of soldiers carrying boughs and weapons, and with a scene representing the dedication of two obelisks to Amen. His reading of the name of the builder of the temple, Amunneitgori, or Amun-noohet, was no nearer to the truth than that of Champollion, though he saw that the French scholar’s unknown Thothmes was no other than Thothmes II. Lepsius, who evidently saw more of the temple than any of his predecessors, was the first to make a real approach to the true reading of its builder’s name. His version of the name, “Numt Amen,” was indeed an almost correct reading of part of Hatshepsut’s title, Khnum Amen; and he conjectured that she was the eldest sister of Thothmes III, who occupied the throne during the minority of her brother, but was not permitted to rank in the regular lists of the kings of Egypt. In 1858 the indefatigable Mariette visited the temple, and added it to the thirty-six other sites at which he carried on excavations during his thirty years of ceaseless toil. He was too busy with other work at Qurneh to give to Der el-Bahri the attention which it deserved, and his work there was carried on only with a small staff, and for a short time, though he worked again at the place in 1862 and 1866. Nor were his methods here such as to be helpful to his successors. Working, as he did all his lifetime, under the lash, as it were, and with the need of getting the largest possible results with the smallest expenditure of money and time, it was impossible for him to make his clearances thorough and methodical. Indeed, he seriously added to the difficulties of subsequent excavators by the fact that instead of removing the rubbish of his excavations completely outside the probable limits of the temple, he was forced by stress of time and want of money simply to dump his waste on the nearest convenient spot within the temple area. The consequence was that when Naville came to make the systematic clearance of the whole building, he found several of the most important chambers completely buried, not only beneath the debris of the centuries, but beneath that also which Mariette had heaped on the top of everything.